JN: In your second volume of autobiography, Cosmic Trigger II, there is a hint of resignation. You say that you would like to be shot into space and listen to Scarlatti. Have you given up on mankind?

RAW: The book was an attempt to present different sides of my personality as they’ve developed in time, and so you get the past mixed up with the present. The past does not always unfold chronologically. It’s the same with ideas – some I held for a long time, some I held for just one afternoon. The book’s an attempt to show that there is no consistent ego. It’s a Buddhist book. So the resignation was just a mood that George Bush Senior put me in around the time of the Gulf War.

by Hagbard Celine (for Black Crayon)

As every thinking person has noticed, our national life has become increasingly weird and surrealistic. The waiting lines at banks and post offices are growing longer all the time, even though demographers tell us US population is no longer rising. The street signs more often than not say WALK on the red and DON’T WALK on the green. You can’t get a plumber on the weekends. Nobody has been able to explain the cattle mutilations yet. Every survey shows that the price of consumer goods, the number of violent crimes, and the eerie popularity of THE GONG SHOW are ominously accelerating.

I believe I have found the explanation these distressing trends. Needless to say, I cannot present, in a short article, all the evidence which I have accumulated in three decades of careful metasociological research; that will have to await the publication of my three-volume study, “Why Everybody Is Going Bonkers.” Here I can only mention the thousands of depth interviews, the innumerable flowcharts and helix-matrix equations, the vast files of computer readouts, the I CHING divinations, and other rigorous scientific techniques used in developing what I modestly call Celine’s Laws of Chaos, Discord and Confusion.

Celine’s First Law is that National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity!

That may sound like a paradox, but I will explain it at once.
Read more.

Responding to a health scare RAW had in October, his good friend RU Sirius dedicated an episode of his podcast to wish him the best of luck and to tell him what he means to his many readers and supporters.

We talk about the great writer/philosopher/prankster Robert Anton Wilson with Lance Bauscher, director of the documentary “Robert Anton Wilson – Maybe Logic” and the force behind the “Maybe Logic Academy.” And we talk to Eric Wagner, author of “An Insider’s Guide to Robert Anton Wilson.” And best of all, Bauscher brought in some reading/performances from the upcoming audio book version of The Illuminatus Trilogy!, which will be released by his Deepleaf Production company.

Robert Anton Wilson left this life January 11, 2007, at 04:50 AM Pacific Time. During his brief 75-year journey on the Third Rock from the Sun, Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), or Bob, was akin to a Renaissance man. He was many things to many different people. While of this Earth, Bob was a Polio survivor, Crowley and Lovecraft reader, Playboy editor, bibliophile, husband, licensed psychologist, father, science fiction writer, conspiracy theory researcher, consciousness explorer, possible alien contactee, literary theorist, Neo-Pagan movement pioneer, guerilla ontologist, Zen Buddhist, Reich and Leary student, candidate for California Governor, founder of the Guns and Dope political Party, advocate for the decriminalization of some drugs, Chaos and Sex Magickian, Burning Man correspondent, futurologist, Subgenius Reverend, Discordian Pope, Agnostic (he was a major proponent of what he would later term “Maybe Logic”), and the inspiration for many.

Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY, January 18, 1932, RAW who was then Robert Edward Wilson, was stricken with polio at a young age, but was treated with the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Method (which consisted of massage therapy and visualization) in 1934. Because Sister Kenny was not a board certified doctor, she like many of the persons Bob would write about during his lifetime, would be shunned despite the positive results of the afflicted patients (many of whom lived long lives such as Bob himself). After this ordeal, he moved to Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn. The ‘faith healing” episode however, was not the only Fortean experience in his childhood; at the age of four, Bob believed he had a sighting of a spider the size of an Australian Shepherd (dog).

Robert Anton Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007
Last night, as it said on the mans blog, Robert Anton Wilson Defied Medical Experts, who expected him to live for another two months, and left his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11.

Wilson was a driving force of energy and optimism, that even up to the transition of that energy to other form(s), never failed or weakened. Right up to the end he remained a force of love, humour, energy and perhaps most of all, intelligence.

Wilson was also, among other things a Mystic, Magician, Guerilla Ontologist, Activist, Libertarian, Drug Taker, Scientist, Joycean Scholar, Fortean, musician, stand up comedian and also, as described by himself and others, a philosopher. Over a forty year career Bob waged war against dogma, idiocy, fear and ignorance.

He was more successful on this mission than anyone else I can name. He wrote many books, including:

Prometheus Rising
Cosmic Trigger
Quantum Psychology
Sex, Drugs and Magic
Reality is what you can get away with
Ishtar Rising
The New inquisition
Everything is Under Control

These books, like Wilson himself, are all beacons of light, humour and a wonderful rationality, both mystical and mischievous, magickal and scientific. I could and will recommend them to anyone who is interested in the future positive evolution of humanity, from the macrocosm of the species to the microcosm of the individual. He educated all of us that came in contact with his work, that, as he said himself, “the universe contains a maybe.”